This dissertation explores the ambiguous nature of the social criticism in Charlotte Brontë’s novels — Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette and The Professor — particularly pertaining to patriarchal ideology and its associated power relations. I shall explore how, through her novels, Brontë sought to redefine subjectivity and the feminine ideal, and in so doing, reconfigure patriarchy’s gender norms and its ideologies which were oppressive to women. However, Brontë’s varying contestation of and acquiescence to female Victorian stereotypes, along with her equivocal representation of ideology, identity, gender, and the self, undermine her efforts to create a new model of womanhood and female empowerment. Nonetheless, through Brontë’s intimate depiction of her characters’ struggles between their desires and patriarchal prescripts, she offers a novel, more indirect and significant challenge to the patriarchal status quo. In this way, Brontë’s social criticism is confined by her conservatism. / English Studies / M.A. (English Literature)

This thesis interrogates García Márquez’s representations of sexualities in the following selected novels: Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981); The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975); One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967); The Sad and Incredible Tale of Innocent Erendira and her Heartless Grandmother (1972); and Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004). It is argued here that García Márquez’s employment of the sexuality motif enables him to delve into many worldwide current concerns such as the irrelevance of some socio-cultural sexual practices; commercial sexual exploitation of children; the different manifestations of prostitution; and female powerlessness under autocratic rule. Earlier literary critics have tended to narrowly interpret García Márquez’s employment of the sexuality motif as just a metaphor for colonial exploitation of the colonised. The study also explores the writer’s artistic role and concludes that García Márquez speaks against commercial sexual exploitation of children as he concurrently speaks on behalf of children so exploited. Similarly, the writer speaks on behalf of prostituted womanhood by showing how prostitutional gains do not seem to cascade down to the prostitutes themselves. García Márquez also invests female sexual passivity as a coping mechanism against a dictator’s limitless power over the life and death of his citizens. However, the writer also constructs female agency that grows from the rejection of an initial victimhood to develop into an extremely flawed and corrupt flesh trade that co-opts and indentures children into sex work with impunity. Thus the study breaks new ground to show that García Márquez’s representations of different sexualities are not merely soft porn masquerading as art. His is a voice added to the worldwide concerns over commercial sexual exploitation of children in the main and also the recovery of a self-reliant female self-hood that was previously inextricably bound to male sexual norms. Quite clearly, García Márquez demonstrates that female prostitution is driven by a lack of social safety nets, a lack of other economically viable options and also a distinct lack of educational opportunities for female economic independence, hence the flawed female agency. / English Studies / D. Litt. et Phil. (English)

This dissertation argues that Nella Larsen, Tess Slesinger, and Jane Bowles, in a set of novels published between 1928 and 1943, all deployed laughter—not humor or comedy, but laughter itself—to express a critique of the rigid prescription of female subjectivity. In a historical window of epistemic instability, between the earlier dominance of humanist individualism and the subsequent dominance of humanist universalism, these authors reacted against nominally liberatory political movements, such as first-wave feminism and Black “uplift,” that had not in fact challenged an ideal of the sovereign subject still modeled on the white male Euro-American individual. Their objections anticipated, by several decades, later critiques of the subject that emerged in second-wave feminism and post-structuralist theory. Laughter, as Larsen, Slesinger, and Bowles understood, reckons with difference, and not only identitarian difference: when we laugh, we recognize someone or something as different, other, and differently different, otherly other—not a defined other, but a fresh challenge to discursive taxonomy. Moreover, when we laugh, experiencing a material overthrow of subjective control, we encounter the otherness, the multiplicity, of the self ever different from itself. Laughter thus opens the self to difference, inside and out. But the “subversive” force of the laughter of the oppressed can also be coopted and reabsorbed by a dominant social order. This project takes up Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) as a case study in the limits of the “subversive,” before turning to Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), Slesinger’s The Unpossessed (1934), and Bowles’ Two Serious Ladies (1943) as exemplars of a more radical laughing objection to the prescription of subjectivity, and to the dualisms that undergird the subject’s construction: self and other, oppression and resistance, mind and body, thought and feeling, depth and surface. The latter novels laugh a “laughter of the middle”: a materially situated, present laughter, living in the in-between spaces of dialectical discourse; a laughter of the here and now, the ever-shifting ground of a self in pieces.

The purpose of my dissertation is to conduct an intertextual study of two fantasy texts — Alice in Wonderland by Victorian author Lewis Carroll, and Stardust by postmodern fantasy author Neil Gaiman — and their filmic re-visionings by Tim Burton and Matthew Vaughn respectively. In scrutinising these texts, drawing on insights from feminist, children’s literature and intertextual theorists, the actions of ‘growing up’ and ‘falling down’ are shown to be indicative of a paradoxical becoming of the text’s central female protagonists, Alice and Yvaine. The social mechanisms of the Victorian age that educate the girl-child into becoming accepting of their domestic roles ultimately alienate her from her true state of being. While she may garner some sense of importance within the imaginary realms of fantasy narratives, as these female protagonists demonstrate, she is reduced to the position of submissive in reality – in ‘growing up’, she must assume a ‘fallen down’ state in relation to the male. / English Studies / M.A. (English)

Liao Weichun. / "August 2004." / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 249-268). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese.

The purpose of my dissertation is to conduct an intertextual study of two fantasy texts — Alice in Wonderland by Victorian author Lewis Carroll, and Stardust by postmodern fantasy author Neil Gaiman — and their filmic re-visionings by Tim Burton and Matthew Vaughn respectively. In scrutinising these texts, drawing on insights from feminist, children’s literature and intertextual theorists, the actions of ‘growing up’ and ‘falling down’ are shown to be indicative of a paradoxical becoming of the text’s central female protagonists, Alice and Yvaine. The social mechanisms of the Victorian age that educate the girl-child into becoming accepting of their domestic roles ultimately alienate her from her true state of being. While she may garner some sense of importance within the imaginary realms of fantasy narratives, as these female protagonists demonstrate, she is reduced to the position of submissive in reality – in ‘growing up’, she must assume a ‘fallen down’ state in relation to the male. / English Studies / M.A. (English)

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The complicated state wherein ex-slaves found themselves, as depicted in the narratives of Bibb, Jacobs, and others, problematizes the dualistic relationship between North and South that the genre’s structural components work to enforce, forging an odyssey that, although sometimes still spiritual in nature, does not offer the type of resolutions that might easily persuade fellow slaves to abandon their masters and seek a similarly ambiguous identity in the so-called “free” land of the North. For blacks and especially fugitive slaves, such restrictive legal provisions provided an “uncertain status” where, writes William Andrews, “the definition of freedom for black people remained open.” In those slave narratives that dare to depict the limits of liberty in the North, this “open” status is particularly reflected in the texts’ discursive terrain itself, which portends a series of candid observations and brutal details that actively work to deconstruct any sort of mythological pattern associated with the slave narrative genre, thereby offering a more expansive view of the experience for most fugitive slaves. The Life of William Grimes, a particularly frank and brutal diary of a man’s trials within and without slavery, is one such slave narrative, depicting a journey that, while more consistent with the general experience of ex-slaves in the antebellum U.S., often works outside the parameters of traditional, straight-forward slave narratives like Douglass’s. “I often was obliged to go off the road,” Grimes admits at one point in his autobiography, and although his remark refers to the cautious path he must tread as a fugitive slave, it might just as well describe the thematic and structural characteristics of his open-ended autobiography. Reputedly the first fugitive slave narrative, the publication of Grimes’s Life in 1825 initiated the beginning of a genre whose path had not yet been forged, which likely contributed to its fluid nature. At the time of his narrative’s publication, Grimes’s self-expressed testimony of injustice under slavery was about five years ahead of its time; it wouldn’t be until the 1830s that the U.S. antislavery movement would begin to consciously seek out ex-slaves to testify to their experience in bondage. Once this literary door was open, however, antislavery sentiment became for many early African American authors “a ready forum” for self-expression. Whereas in twenty years’ time Douglass would take full advantage of this opportunity by drawing inspiration from a number of already established narratives, Grimes as an author found himself singularly “off the road” and essentially alone in new literary territory, uncannily reflecting his sense of alienation and helplessness in the North after escaping from slavery aboard a cargo ship in 1815.

The central problem in this dissertation entails how the concept volksmoeder (mother of the nation) gradually developed to secure a place in the Afrikaans drama. Chapter 1 determines the hypothesis of this dissertation. Chapter 2 focusses on the volksmoeder characteristics. The conclusion reached in Chapter 2 is that Maria in Langenhoven’s Die vrou van Suid-Afrika (1918) reveals similarities and contrasts with female characters in Dutch plays. Chapter 3 ascertains that characteristics of female personages as mothers of the nation determine their positions in patriarch/volksmoeder relationships in W.A. de Klerk’s Die jaar van die vuur-os (1952). Different types of volksmoeder appear in the above-mentioned farm play and in H.A. Fagan’s Ousus (1934). Chapters 4 and 5 identify how the present day volksmoeder in recent plaasdramas such as Deon Opperman’s Donkerland (1996), André P. Brink’s Die jogger (1997), Ek, Anna van Wyk (1986) and Die koggelaar (1988) by Pieter Fourie, indicate a further development in the concepts patriarch and volksmoeder. In the latter’s Koggelmanderman (2003) the man and woman are removed from the idea of gender. / Die sentrale probleem in die verhandeling behels hoe die konsep volksmoeder met verloop van tyd in die Afrikaanse drama neerslag gevind het. Hoofstuk 1 bepaal die hipoteses van die verhandeling. Hoofstuk 2 fokus op die kenmerke van die volksmoeder. Die gevolgtrekking in hoofstuk 2 is dat Maria in Langenhoven se Die vrou van Suid-Afrika (1918) ooreenstem en kontrasteer met Nederlandse vrouefigure. Hoofstuk 3 stel vas dat vrouefigure se kenmerke as volksmoeders hul posisie binne die patriarg/volksmoederverhouding in W.A. de Klerk se Die jaar van die vuur-os (1952) bepaal. Verskillende soorte volksmoeder -verskyn in bogenoemde plaasdrama en in H.A. Fagan se Ousus (1934). Hoofstukke 4 en 5 identifiseer hoe hedendaagse volksmoeders in nuwe plaasdramas, soos Deon Opperman se Donkerland (1996), Andre P. Brink se Die jogger (1997), Ek, Anna van Wyk (1986) en Die koggelaar (1988) van Pieter Fourie, verder binne die patriarg/volksmoederverhouding ontwikkel. In laasgenoemde se Koggelmanderman (2003) beweeg die man en vrou weg van die konsepte patriarg en volksmoeder. / Afrikaans & Theory of Literature / M.A. (Afrikaans)

The central problem in this dissertation entails how the concept volksmoeder (mother of the nation) gradually developed to secure a place in the Afrikaans drama. Chapter 1 determines the hypothesis of this dissertation. Chapter 2 focusses on the volksmoeder characteristics. The conclusion reached in Chapter 2 is that Maria in Langenhoven’s Die vrou van Suid-Afrika (1918) reveals similarities and contrasts with female characters in Dutch plays. Chapter 3 ascertains that characteristics of female personages as mothers of the nation determine their positions in patriarch/volksmoeder relationships in W.A. de Klerk’s Die jaar van die vuur-os (1952). Different types of volksmoeder appear in the above-mentioned farm play and in H.A. Fagan’s Ousus (1934). Chapters 4 and 5 identify how the present day volksmoeder in recent plaasdramas such as Deon Opperman’s Donkerland (1996), André P. Brink’s Die jogger (1997), Ek, Anna van Wyk (1986) and Die koggelaar (1988) by Pieter Fourie, indicate a further development in the concepts patriarch and volksmoeder. In the latter’s Koggelmanderman (2003) the man and woman are removed from the idea of gender. / Die sentrale probleem in die verhandeling behels hoe die konsep volksmoeder met verloop van tyd in die Afrikaanse drama neerslag gevind het. Hoofstuk 1 bepaal die hipoteses van die verhandeling. Hoofstuk 2 fokus op die kenmerke van die volksmoeder. Die gevolgtrekking in hoofstuk 2 is dat Maria in Langenhoven se Die vrou van Suid-Afrika (1918) ooreenstem en kontrasteer met Nederlandse vrouefigure. Hoofstuk 3 stel vas dat vrouefigure se kenmerke as volksmoeders hul posisie binne die patriarg/volksmoederverhouding in W.A. de Klerk se Die jaar van die vuur-os (1952) bepaal. Verskillende soorte volksmoeder -verskyn in bogenoemde plaasdrama en in H.A. Fagan se Ousus (1934). Hoofstukke 4 en 5 identifiseer hoe hedendaagse volksmoeders in nuwe plaasdramas, soos Deon Opperman se Donkerland (1996), Andre P. Brink se Die jogger (1997), Ek, Anna van Wyk (1986) en Die koggelaar (1988) van Pieter Fourie, verder binne die patriarg/volksmoederverhouding ontwikkel. In laasgenoemde se Koggelmanderman (2003) beweeg die man en vrou weg van die konsepte patriarg en volksmoeder. / Afrikaans and Theory of Literature / M.A. (Afrikaans)